Zaption Session

Agenda: 1. Five minute overview: What is Zaption? 2. Create your accounts 3. Built at least one Zaption for use next week with your students. 4. Leave a link to your live Zaption as a comment to this post.

I have been helping out a friend who is doing some work with local libraries and teachers. The class ties together three locations in Summit and Cuyahoga counties in North East Ohio.

If you live around here, you know we are having a very cold winter. Resulting in hundreds of schools being canceled daily due to below zero temperatures, with wind-chills -20's to -30's. As you can imagine that has impacted this class as teachers are home and not able to make it to classroom locations. Last Thursday we tried something I thought would work and it did. We sent an email that informed the teachers they could stay home for class and join us remotely if they wish. Out of the three classes with a total of 19 students we had 8 come to the classrooms while the other 11 joined from the warmth of their own home. We streamed the hangout (that tied the three classrooms together) over youtube and pushed out a join code on the feed and classroom website for Peardeck.

Those that joined remotely could hear us speaking and open a new tab to see the pushed presentation in Peardeck. These remote students could answer questions in Peardeck and I as the presenter in Akron then shared my screen and they could read all other student's responses. After the 1 hour and 30 minutes class, we had 129 interactions. I will point out, that on the "exit" pass several of them had one common complaint. Which was that they could not ask a direct question without us pushing them that option in peardeck. But overall is was a big success. At least I think it was. Have a warm safe week. Garth

Thank you for trenching through the snow and attending the Dublin Literacy Conference today.

I have included screenshots of today's Peardeck so everyone can refer back to it later.

The best part of the day was seeing and hearing the students talk about the different tools they have used throughout the school year. If you have any questions about the tools the students highlighted please feel free to contact me in the comment section, on twitter @DMSArmstrong or email armstrong@teachersfortomorrow.net.

Mike and I would like to thank all of you for showing up at 8:00 AM. We were both surprised and happy with how many people came out to hear us talk a little bit about Autonomous Mastery Learning. Below the images are both presentations we did at #Oetc15.

Just another Sunday here at the Holman household. Cassidy wanted to use the Chromebook to do some writing. I knew she would get on her google docs and write creative stories: Page after page of stories. However, when I walk around to see the screen I saw her doing research on the native people of early Ohio. She had four or five documents on Ohio Natives.

I took a deeper look. To my surprise she was working with two other 4th graders on this research. They are using google docs to collaborate, research from the web and learn content.

Cassidy, spent 15 to 20 minutes reading each of her google docs to my wife and I. I am very happy to see this happening at her school and hope she is learning much more then who these early natives were, but learning how to work with others to achieve results that are bigger then each could achieve alone.

If you have never heard of Google Classroom, and you are a Google Apps for Education school, then check out this blog post for the skinny. Google Classroom has made a few impactful updates over the last few months, and these seem to have been crowned with the release of the classroom app for iOS and Android. The app works very well, utilizes the swipe-ability of touch screen devices and feels intuitive. Although on my iPhone I could not get to the "about" tab, I'm sure the kinks will be worked out over the next few days (that's the problem with being an early adopter).

The one great thing about the app, is the language it uses for students. When a student clicks on an assignment, he can view "instructions" and "your work". This is much more digestible than "assignment details" and "my assignment". I'm hopeful that the desktop version of Classroom will soon look more like the mobile version.

Some changes to the full-version of Classroom also hit my screen last night, so I thought I would take a moment to list those changes. I know it can be frustrating for staff when change occurs. It doesn't have to be sweeping change, even the little things tend to throw some of us right out of our rockers (Ask Microsoft about getting rid of the windows button :).

A few Cool tools on the App:

Snap a photo and attach it directly to an assignment. This would be great if your homework was to "find examples of Roman architecture in your community".

Sharing from other apps is also available to attach images, pdf, etc to assignments.

Offline cache means each time you open the app, it stores info on your device, just in case your 3g goes away.

Teacher Changes in Classroom:

On your home screen, you can no longer delete a class. Google (and the internet) never deletes anything. Classes can now be archived. This is nice because at the end of a semester, or the year, you can archive all classes. They become un-editable, but students and teachers can still go in and view them. Find your archived classes under the menu button, all the way at the bottom.

Under the menu icon (upper left) You can now see assignments in each of your classes. This includes assignments you might have to complete, if you are enrolled in a class

Student Changes in Classroom:

Menu button (upper left) also gives students a quick view of assignments for each class.

It's almost Middle Ages webquest time at BMS. Like every year, I was reflecting on how to make changes to the automatous mastery learning unit (Click this link to see the many posts about this unit). Travis and I began to discuss how it could change. I wanted a different response to the computer side chat. Mike and I had the students list three to five facts they learned, then tell us two questions they had. I really like the questions students asked, but I wanted students to get more from the chats...So I remember people using google forms to make quizzes. I tweeted out a question and Mike was quick to get us to Flubaroo. I had heard of it, but never saw a need for it until now.

So, Travis took on the task of learning how to use it and email students notes, grades and the questions they had. His tutorial is below. I must admit it takes a few times to get it down, but once you do it has amazing possibilities for classroom use and formative assessment. These forms are basic information presented in the chat. They are not a quiz...more of a listening task with hope students will learn more from some guiding questions as they listen.

Below the tutorial is a test example (will not be used with kids as we have already added other sections-- copies for each school, last question asking for questions--its not graded, and putting them in order of that the chat presents them), If you take it you should get an email with in a few minutes with feedback--see images below. Let us know your thoughts on Flubaroo or how you use it.

We had an opportunity to do our first joint peardeck together the first day back after the long Thanksgiving weekend. In regards to the program itself the outcome was great students were engaged and found it pretty cool that they were able to be taught by another teacher over 130 miles away. It was also good for them to be able to see not only him but his students as well.

Travis Armstrong @dmsarmstrong from Dublin City Schools wrote this post. My comments are in RED, where needed.

As mentioned in one of the previous blog posts (#Kahoot via #skype: Distance gaming!) Garth and I have been trying to find ways to have more interaction between our students. Our first method of increasing interaction was very successful by gamifying the way we review with our students via Kahoot. The next method on our to try list was a joint Peardeck. Peardeck (See Posts about Peardeck:One and two) is a presentation software that allows you to conduct a formative assessment while presenting new material. You can have slides that ask the students questions ranging from multiple choice to short response questions. You can also have your students move a colored dot, or have them draw directly onto the slide to highlight something to illustrate their understanding.

So how were we able to do this? Garth and I both have two projectors in our rooms one projector was being used to show the other teachers classroom and for this we used GoogleHangout, while on the other projector we had skype up and were utilizing the screen share feature so the projected version of Peardeck could be seen by both classes. Now I mentioned the outcome of the program was great but we did think the experience would work better if we were able to use a video conferencing system assuming it would make it easier for the two classes to hear one another by eliminating some of the background noise and provide us with a better image into one another's class.

Please email or Tweet Travis or myself is you have questions.

The tools today, that we have access to really do "take down the WALLS of a classroom". To think I was pushing a presentation 150 miles away to 50 students in Columbus, on cell phones, ipads, and laptops, while in the blink of an eye I could "SEE" if they understood what I had just explained. The use of quick questions, short responses and other types of formative assessment built into PearDeck, allowed both Travis and I to understand what OUR student's were learning and if were on the right track.

I am blown aways with the possibilities of what we can do with the technology being produced for education.

Two summers ago Mike and I where doing an inservice for a school district in Indiana. One of the teachers, Mr. Guthrie-- @EjhsGuthrie, told us how he planned to use Hadoken in his classroom to begin the building of trust with his students (#1st5days). I had never heard of Hadoken, but found the idea interesting and kept it in mind. This year, I was ready to start the year off with Hakoken.

What is a hadoken you ask? Here is the definition one of my students provided.:A hadoken is an impression, or illusion, of something that is happening when it really isn't. Related to an idea of perspective and how you look at things, hadokens are pictures where things are not what they seem. The term was first used in the video game StreetFighter from 1987 (Hence the tweet). I took about 10 minutes to present the slide show below to my students. I started with the Theme from Wizards of Weaverly Place--"Things are not always what they seem". We discussed how the song could have meaning in our study of history. This was day three of school. Read about day one, Harry Wong "First Day of school Not for me" Or see a video of day one here: Creating a Culture that Inspires.

My idea was to get kids to see that history is not always what it seems. We read a book and assume it is an accurate picture of history. We assume the author is telling us the Truth. I wanted kids to think about how perspectives can distort the truth and in turn distort our view of the past and the world we live in.

So we went outside and used iPhones, or what ever they had, and produced 100 or more Hadoken Photos. The first one fooled my own children who thought I really had jumped that high.

So, what did they learn?

Letssee astudent's blog postfor the rest of the story. I would like to note this was their first blog post of the year. Almost every child spoke about perspective and how our own eyes mislead us and I provided no instruction in Photoshop. It was a powerful lesson.

"Hadoken's relate to history, because just like in the title they aren't what they seem to be. When you look at the picture an illusion of something amazing happening is seen, but it is really a trick of the camera. Just as in hadoken's what is on the surface isn't always what happened in history. People can infer using evidence to find out what happened in the past, but since we were not living there in that time, no one really knows what happened in history. Following clues we may get to one conclusion about history, but what really happened may be completely different, just like how only the people taking the hadoken know the picture is an illusion, but outsiders do not."

"Some things in history can be impressions and appear as if something had happened when it really didn't or something different happened instead."

"Hadoken relates to history because Hadoken is all about perspective and so is history, we can look at history from many different angles and we have no past information about it so it just may not be as it seems.

"Hadoken is all about looking at things from a different perspective, and in history, different perspectives change the way it is told."

"Hadoken teaches us that everything is not as it seems , just like in hadoken , in history somethings are not always the way we see it from our point of view , The teaching of history is subject to varying interpretations for example the narratives point of view . Just like how we know Martin Luther King's point of view towards freedom , discrimination , justice and equality. We can see a different point of view from this situation from the other people who disagree and who did not feel the same way."

"Like history, hadoken is a matter of perspective. The one on the left was actually taken close to the ground, as you can see, which makes Lucas seems to be high up in the air. He didn't jump that high, but how I took the picture, in this case, on the ground and slightly upward, makes it look different than how it actually was. History is the same. Same things may not be seem the same in different perspectives. Slavery in America hundreds of years ago is a good example. If you learn in the perspective of the people who bought and sold the slaves, you'll never know the truth in the slaves' perspectives, how it actually was like. So, you should try to think in others' perspective in the situations, like how it would have been like, when learning history."

"YOU MAY NOT REALIZE IT BUT HADOKENS HAVE A CONNECTION TO HISTORY. I'VE LEARNED, WITH HADOKENS, THAT EVERYTHING ISN'T ALWAYS WHAT IS SEEMS. HISTORY IS THE SAME. JUST WHEN YOU THINK YOU SEE SOMETHING CLEARLY IN HISTORY, SOMETHING ELSE UNEXPECTED COMES UP, THAT THROWS EVERYTHING OFF. WE DON'T ACTUALLY KNOW WHAT HAPPENED THEN, BUT WE TRY TO FIGURE IT OUT.ALSO, HADOKENS ARE TAKEN FROM DIFFERENT ANGLES TO CREATE DIFFERENT EFFECTS. THIS RELATES TO HISTORY BECAUSE HISTORY IS ALL ABOUT PERSPECTIVE! GETTING DIFFERENT POINT OF VIEW ALLOWS YOU TO SEE HISTORY THROUGH DIFFERENT EYES."

A few days later Mr Armstrong (a social studies teacher in Dublin) had his students view the blogs previously described as a way to teach his students about perspective. His comments and feedback can be seen below in RED.I have used images like the one the students created at the beginning of the school year in the past. I to have the students talk about perspective and how it relates to the study of history. The students come away with a good understanding of perspective but the lesson missed that extra little something. However this year prior to doing my lesson using the images above I told the students we would be talking about perspective and would have an opportunity to view some of Mr. Holman's student work. This statement alone caught my students attention and they were much more engaged during this lesson than they had been in years passed. Even though we were unable to create our own hadokens the students were able to live vicariously through Mr. Holmans and we're excited to learn about perspective.

Leave it to the creator of "The Dot" to create such a short and insightful commentary on the current state of affairs in education. It's hard to watch this and not think, what are we doing? Let's leave it at that. Your comments are always welcome.

If you are not from Ohio, you might find the 5 of 8 rule worth taking a look at. Final vote is due in the spring.

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